oracle

To add to this, here is a rough explanation of why “average” people still exist.

If you take every job in the world, and group them up, you’re gonna get significantly more maintenance type jobs, time-gated jobs, tetris type jobs, and basically every job that requires about 2 brain cells to perform perfectly, than any job that actually requires critical thinking.

So we can either take you, the smartest meat popsicle man on the planet, and make you stand there and hold a stop sign in the middle of traffic in 100F/38C weather for 10 hours straight six days a week,

OR

we can give that job to somebody else and have you design highway interchanges.

Take your pick.

I have this hypothesis that masking their authenticity in order to fit in with their respective social group is the normal way also in NT people.

This is not correct. A “neurotypical” (term is terrible, there are good reasons) does not “mask” in most situations. They are simply using their own personality. People with autism have this nasty habit of trying to find “the correct answer”, which is something that simply doesn’t exist most of the time. If a normal person is masking, it is likely that they are doing so because they are still trying to maintain some image of civility.

The other part of this is that a question with no correct answer, however, still has wrong answers. If someone asks you what you are doing this weekend, “researching goatse” is a most certainly a wrong answer. All of this is dependent on the other person. In the case of a random person, it’s easier to just leave out everything longer than a single sentence, which is why talking with strangers always feels oddly hollow.

Example

TALK: “[person you hate] died yesterday.”

Normal: “Good, fuck that guy in particular.”

Masked: “That’s … unfortunate.”

It is true, though, that an average person doesn’t have to think about every sensory input. That’s the only real high-level difference. Most people are also incapable of focusing on more than one task. It just seems like multitasking or speedy processing because they can drop tasks at a moment’s notice. For someone who actually does have hardware multitasking, high process speed, and acute sense of time, interacting with an average person feels like an eternity. If I had to fancy a fat guess, I’d say this is why people with autism seem to prefer online interaction – because there’s no timelines for said interaction, and the lack of the information that they have to track makes interacting much faster.

To me it’s not actually an apology

Then stop doing it. An apology is for when you did or could have fucked something up. “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to reply sooner” means you are aware of a deadline involved for the other party and that deadline may have been fucked by your untimely response.

when they reassure me I don’t need to apologize

This means there was either no deadline involved or the deadline did not pass or nothing was fucked as a result. Also means that you may have incorrectly assumed information about the existence or properties of a deadline.

Knowledge and skill level can be divided approximately by degree and type of brainpower used. In this manner, Unconscious Use > Conscious Use.

Think about it this way: You’ve blocked everything out so you can dice an onion perfectly. If one thing distracts you, the dicing is gonna get fucked. Meanwhile, Sous Chef-san can dice an onion with his eyes closed and yelling at the new guy because he’s about to dump the wrong spice into the soup. Who one do you think is better at chopping onions?

Memorization is not learning. Learning is the ability to cross-reference information, and intelligence is the ability to select the appropriate knowledge to apply for the situation.

It said too many local connections, not enough long range connections, ie get stuck on details and no big picture. It’s pretty close to what I know as autism, but in medical jargon. It doesn’t state an important known part though, in that autistic left/right hemisphere utilization is the opposite of a normal brain. Normal is something like 45 left/55 right, autistic is 55 left/45 right. If you’ll notice, autism causes issues with all skills considered to be right brain (language, emotions, spatial, etc)…

tl;dr overthink step 1, forgot step 2 though 9, last step failed, meltdown

Figure out whether your circadian time is set for early morning (~5AM wake up time), day (~10AM wake), or night (~2PM wake). Despite what most people think, it’s incredibly hard for one type to adapt to another.

“I have autism”

uh…don’t open with this…

-The perception of autism has been ruined by being popular. Since very few of the nonphysical autism symptoms are unique to autism, you can maybe try showing the bits that are normal first and explain at some point when they notice differences? I myself did not know there were physical symptoms until I read the Wikipedia entry.

What’s a good way to phrase this so a person knows I’m not being snarky?

-A large portion of comedy is just timing. As such inappropriate timing will bomb really hard. It’s also quite common for a person’s personality to not match their physical appearance or language use. If you mention things early and often, and not after issues arise, it should be okay. Also, mention if you have trouble with tones and inflections. (This made me think of the Johnny Carson tomahawk bit, where he kept his mouth shut for a solid half minute before saying his line)

But isn’t someone informing them also how people learn?

-There are multiple ways to learn, and that’s actually one of the less common ones, especially if it’s just a flat “don’t” without an actual answer. The most common method being things exploding in your face.

-It’s rather easy to learn from prior knowledge, but all of human knowledge had to be discovered at some point, which means somebody had to fuck it up repeatedly to get there, because they sure as hell didn’t get perfect completion on the first try.

I track everybody with the same method, their logic trees. Everybody’s logic is true to themselves, and if you can figure out said logic (which is not easy), it’s incredibly easy to figure out a lot of things about a person.

-So, having known 2.5 people with officially diagnosed autism (one autism, one asperger’s, one somebody’s kid), and combined with the lurking in this community (both pre and post lemmy), I’ve noticed an odd thing about autistic logic trees.

-Each individual branch on their logic tree is almost always something that a normal person might have. The difference is what a normal person would have that an autistic individual almost certainly either does not have, or has a toddler/child version of. The vast majority of these missing/underdeveloped branches tend to be what are considered right-brained behaviors. It’s like autistic people are colorblind, but in regards to right-brained function.

-Meaning roughly, anytime a normal person would use such things as emotion, it appears to me that an autistic person replaces said response with blunt logic. As in, they evaluate things on a flat scale of good/bad, with disregard to whether emotion was originally involved. One of the behaviors that I notice from autistic people is that they almost always choose a method that is guaranteed over a method that isn’t, regardless of whether or not it actually matters. This causes odd responses whenever a normal person “likes” something that is just flatly bad in an autistic individual’s mind (or hates something that is flatly good), and also when the guaranteed methods aren’t supposed to be used often/repeatedly.

-A portion of autistic people have figured this out, to mean that many individual preferences have approximately jack shit to do with intelligence or anything else. I might not be able to discern the difference between these people and a “neurotypical”. They’d just be people who do things slightly oddly to me (which is basically everybody).

-A portion of autistic people appear to have learned that liking “bad” things means that you are stupid. That’s what it sounds like to me when they call all NTs stupid and start making assumptions about NT behavior and reasoning. It sounds like they’re projecting.

If yall want some tips about interacting with people here are some

-The average person really is very stupid. But also very easy going. Tell them in advance that you’re not judging them even if it looks that way.

-Tell people in advance that you suck at people skills. This is a totally normal thing to suck at and people won’t be surprised.

-Allow people to be wrong. Mistakes is how people learn and how evolution works. Also, when you get to the top of human knowledge, you will realize that you’re still missing something and the only two tools you will have for such an occasion is doing random shit and exploding shit to see what happens.

-Separate assholes from “neurotypical”. Those are not the same. The average person doesn’t know how to deal with things they haven’t encountered (that’s you, and your job to teach them). Assholes require exactly zero personal responsibility and for everything to be exactly their way and no other way.